GCSEs 2012 support thread

[Kez100]

Here we go........hold on tight!

French Monday , RE Tuesday and French again on Wednesday.
He tends to go off his food when nervous and never drinks enough IMO.
I feel powerless to interfere help so am nagging him about having a good breakfast and plenty to drink at school.

We got back home surprisingly early today so operation revision has been brought forward! I have bought him chocolate to get through it but he did not look impressed at all when I suggested that work would be a good idea :o

Ds is upstairs fast asleep.
He got up watched a film, then was going to do biology, but we went to a cat rehoming day, then there was a nice pub so we decided to stay for lunch. Ds had a huge roast, came home to do revising and he fell asleep.
He can do some tonight

I feel like I am one of the few parents whose DC are REFUSING to revise. If she picks up a book it is for two minutes. Had a very half hearted look at vocab express this weekend. French and Art this week but two of the sciences and English next. Refuses to look at past papers as she says she has done them all in school. I have got beyond the stage of shouting and nagging. I have offered help but she just rejects it. I can tell she is anxious but I don't know what else to do to help her. She won't fail but will probably get Bs and a couple of As instead of the straight sweep of A/A*s she is expecting.

Fluffy, the vast majority of DS's 'revision' takes place in his room - there is no proof that he actually does it! I think that is true for many people's DC.

Part of the reason DS struggles with revision is that he doesn't want to do the subjects he doesn't enjoy. Hopefully this will mean he might revise better next year.

Well I just had a phonecall. It was Ds from Ds upstairs requesting coffee because he is revising. Apparently I will get much gold in my next life.

Idontknow I have said something similar too! Cleaning and sharing the cooking once it's all over. There will just be a spa interlude

hello. i didn't notice you lot here.

ARGH! exams start tomorrow! DD1 has French. Aready got Art out of the way (thank god). Finishes on June 25th with Geography. She's worked prety well I think but I've mostly left her to it with only a bit of nagging. She won't let me test her though so who knows.
Good luck all!

Hello

Dear fluffy,

|Don't worry, my friend's bright son didn't start working until 20 - when he finally felt ready for uni and is now on line for a first. Took two gap years. Some take longer to mature.

Thanks for your reassurances - at least DD has been working on her art today so perhaps she is not as unmotivated as I thought! Still worried about French though.

OK based on what you know now - just a few days from the first exams - what recommendations would you give other children to do well in advance of the final revision stages. What would have made the last few weeks that much easier in terms of revision if it had been done sometime before??

Hi Fluffy. I suspect you are in the majority, not the minority although am perhaps judging on my ds's standards and just hoping he's not the only one.

It's so difficult.

My ds1 honestly thought he could just wing it through GCSE's. He didn't get the grades he wanted or was expected to. Did he learn from it, no. He has done exactly the same thing with A levels.

Ds2 does get on with it. He dips in and out of revision. He isn't stressed but is aware of the work needed to get the grades he would like.

Good luck to everyone with exams coming up.

I would say, work consistently hard on courseworks/controlled assessments from the start, so you bank good grades early to avoid eating into precious year 11 time or resitting. Resits should be for bad luck situations rather than covering for unprepared attempts.

Then, if the school run early English or Maths and modular sciences,, work very very hard at that time (when you don't have a whole raft of exams to revise for) and bank it at your target grade (if at all possible). One major exam out of the way is a big big bonus.

Year 11 is remarkably short. So make the most of year 10/autumn term year 11. That then frees you up to give you the best amount of free time to revise for summer year 11.

< thud >

ds has just {voluntarily} said he's going to do a bit of revision

First exam tomorrow!

The advice dss school sent us isno more than 30-60 minutes at a time of revision
make sure they are fed and watered
an keep things in perspective.
Ds has only. really just knuckled down. I don't think he really knew how to revise until very recently.

It is annoying that DD seems to have picked up no good study habits/skills during her secondary career. I asked why she was revising from a CGP book rather than her own notes and she said she had difficulty reading her own hand-writing .

She looked at Vocab Express for about 5 minutes tonight and then decided to have a bath - just has to try and memorise tomorrow morning I guess!

Well, here we go. DD is fed, watered, bathed and going up to bed. She has looked at Bitesize French for about half an hour. She says she's ready.

Just checked she has a pen that works and a spare pen that works. Asked her if she knew what time it started. She looked at me like I think that was me being told to 'shut the f up'!

beingfluffy your dd sounds like mine. She hates writing, so will always revise by staring vacantly at reading text books. She doesn't seem to make notes in class either. But, when quizzed on things she does seem to know quite a lot, so I reckon she pays attention well in class and learns there. I am so glad she has revision lessons until half term and isn't on study leave, especially after this weekend. We too are a little worried about French tomorrow, it's her worst subject, but it will be lovely to have it over with (probably for ever) on Thursday.

The advice to take the controlled assessments seriously from the start is good. Dd's early ones weren't that great, but the recent ones have been excellent. It's a big help to go into the exams knowing you are already on the way to your target grade.

Did anyone else's DC get given a guideline amount of revision to aim for each day? DS has been told from one teacher that more than four hours is counter productive yet another told him to structure his revision as he would the school day, including the time he would spend on homework!

What have your DC been told to aim for and what do you think is a reasonable amount?

No guidance here but then our children are still in school. School seem to be arranging in house revision sessions and collapsing the timetable a lot. This Tuesday is a dedicated English day, for example. There are also dedicated quiet revision rooms for those with completed subjects - currently, drama and art are finished and probably others too.

I think DD is doing quite a lot at school tbh and I don't want to push it too much at home as well.

Her timetable now has lots of gaps in it, since she's already secured her Maths and English GCSE, so that's 10 hours a week and by the end of this week French and RE will be done too. They have been assigned IT rooms for those 'free' lessons and she's been going to the subject areas she needs to concentrate on instead. She's also been going to after school lessons. I know she's going because I had to sign a form to say she was going and they phoned last week to make sure she was still coming.

Good luck to ds1 who starts his As levels tomorrow. Fingers, toes and everything else crossed. Xxxxx

Same as Kez and Maureen -ds is still at school. They attend 'lessons' (as in revision periods supervised by their subject teachers) as per normal Yr11 timetable until they have finished all exams for that subject. So, for eg, ds has finished his maths by taking a linear exam in MArch, so whenever maths is timetabled they go to another room and can revise what they want, but have to sit quietly and look as if they are revising, but, as he's still got all the other subjects to go, up until this week he is following pretty much his normal timetable for everything else. Once he finishes French (for example as that's his first exam, tomorrow) then he'll no longer go to any French sessions, etc.,.etc.

I'm therefore not so worried about the small amounts he is doing at home, as I know he's fitting in 6 hrs at school a day.